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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25904290">something rotten</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/asukalangley/pseuds/asukalangley'>asukalangley</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Neon Genesis Evangelion</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Post-Canon, hell yeah for healing hell yeah for trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 12:47:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,666</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25904290</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/asukalangley/pseuds/asukalangley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>despite what they thought, sometimes everything <i>is</i> about asuka.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>something rotten</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>i. the world ends like this:</p><p>shinji’s fingers digging into her newly-birthed neck. the sky is blood – no, scratch that, everything is blood and flesh again now, with her contempt bleeding out of her for everyone to see. she says: ‘how disgusting’, and asuka traces the words with her mouth until they are hers once more.</p><p>here she is: alive again.</p><p>how marvellous!</p><p>it’s almost enough to make her wish she was still dead.</p><p> </p><p>ii. so she’ll go to therapy. real therapy, not ritsuko’s poor excuse for makeshift childcare (throw a pill at them and watch them swallow). one where her therapist isn’t quite so distant and far more kind, who sits patiently while asuka rants and tears the tissues and clings to her fraying soul. at the five week mark she decides she’ll cry. loud tears, the kind of sobs that involve your entire body, the kind only worth releasing on the tiles of the bathroom floor. she’ll let ten years worth of neglect and self-hate wash down her hands and into the floor.</p><p>she’ll leave nerv. she’ll kiss goodbye to the pilot program, to her science career, to her skewed perception of making her mother proud. she’ll go get her second degree, she thinks, and maybe then she’ll be happy. she’ll turn around ‘til it’s all out of her head: the evangelions, arael, her impalement and subsequent death.</p><p>her mother’s memory, looming tall like a shadow at her back, says she’s making a mistake. asuka bares her teeth and says: it’s mine to make.</p><p> </p><p>iii. you’re asuka langley, the mirror says, you can have anything you want.</p><p>(<em>do you even like it? </em> her shadowed eyes ask. <em> i don’t have to like it. i don’t </em> have <em> to like anything. </em> she thinks. <em> i’m asuka langley</em>. <em> i can have anything i want.) </em></p><p>sometimes it’s not even about what she looks like to other people – that’s the mistake they always made. thinking it was about them. sometimes it was just about taking it in; the perfume, the makeup, the way misato’s shirt made her figure shrink into herself. despite what they thought, sometimes everything <em> is </em> about asuka.</p><p>the world’s her candy shop.</p><p> </p><p>iv. rei doesn’t come back.</p><p> </p><p>v. she sees shinji again; it’s unavoidable really. they want to know what actually happened. when he speaks, she thinks about dolphins, or the takeout she’ll get after, or all the things she wants to yell at him, like she might finally pierce through his self-righteousness with sheer will alone. (<em>let me tell you a secret, shinji – no, a secret about you. you want to know why everyone hates you? it’s because you hate everyone else. look at me, poor sad shinji, everyone’s so mean to me all the time, no one likes me! have you ever tried liking anyone else? have you ever thought that maybe we’re all suffering, too? you’re not special. look at me! </em>and the record keeps on spinning.) sometimes the kindest thing asuka can do is stay silent, or at least say words that sound like such.</p><p>at first it’s all they want to talk about: instrumentality, and then for those that were around for it, second impact. asuka can’t quite bring herself to tell the whole truth. at least, not about that moment when everything seemed to click into place – <em> oh silly asuka, your mother never left you! she was with you all along! </em> now she can see it from a more clinical perspective: her mother’s maternal instincts were ripped from her. there was no conscious choice in the matter, no moment when her mother turned her nose up at asuka and thought, well, i’d quite like to leave that child for dead; rather there were angels and robots (cyborgs now, she thinks bitterly), a group of egocentric freaks who handled their feelings worse than a teenage girl, and a man who married a woman with a god complex, who wanted more than anything to betray them all for her.</p><p>the point is: it happened, her mother loved her, instrumentality sucked, and now her therapist thinks she should learn to seek validation from within. she should sell the movie rights to her life.</p><p>(here is the root of the truth, the thing asuka doesn’t want to admit even when it crawls over her in the dark of the night, because she’s never experienced this before, not in any meaningful way: healing isn’t linear.</p><p>there are days she wakes up and the sun is shining, and the people are beautiful, and asuka thrives on it all; the electricity of being near another person.</p><p>there are other days she wakes up and wishes she’d met her mother on the other end of the noose.)</p><p>asuka doesn’t want to forget what happened. that doesn’t mean she wants to <em> talk </em> about it.</p><p>so they have to stand with what’s left of nerv – maya is noticeably absent, and misato is looking like she’s starting to regret the choice to return. but they stand there with their questions, and their prodding, and oh, should they do some more tests? asuka wants to tell them all to shove it, but she’s still their dazzling beauty queen, her interface headset her golden crown, even after all this time.</p><p>(asuka thinks perhaps the worst thing of all is that she asked for all of this, didn’t she? she wanted to fight. she wanted the glory. she’s asuka langley. she can have anything she wants.)</p><p>the remains of eva unit-02 stand there like an ever-watchful god she knows by heart, and she places a hand to the cool surface of its large foot, knowing it won’t respond. perhaps they’ll reboot the evangelions one day. perhaps someone with an even brighter mind and less mommy issues than ritsuko will come along and solve the missing x, but by then asuka will no longer be a child, and there will be yet another asuka-shaped hole eager to be filled.</p><p>(besides, she thinks, the sooner they get this over with, the sooner she can go home.)</p><p> </p><p>vi. asuka spends too much time measuring things by what they’re not.<em> i don’t hate myself anymore, so that must mean i love myself, right? </em> wrong.</p><p>“who am i?” asuka asks the blood-red sky, and the silence is just as thunderous as it’s always been.</p><p> </p><p>vii. she takes the pigtails out one day, then the clips. it takes a long time for things to stop feeling like they did before, like she’s plastered up against misery’s side. but it happens.</p><p>germany is all tilted, like coming home and finding all your furniture’s been slightly moved to the left. the air smells like death, and while familiar, it’s not a comfort.</p><p>but still, people don’t look at her with wonder or awe here. well, they do, but not because she’s the pilot who temporarily held off all their inevitable transition to goo and interstellar matter. she flicks her shining, red hair behind her shoulder. a boy shoves his friend’s arm. some things never get old.</p><p>she doesn’t stop learning, though; on the train, at university (she goes back to get her masters, and besides – she still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of her japanese characters), or on the floor beside her bed, just because she still has to punish herself for her existence in some form or another. she reads homer – finally – and carson and schopenhauer. becker hits a sore spot, and she craves and detests the knowledge in equally conflicting measures (it’s a little too on the nose for her – and everyone else’s – life, after all).</p><p>her late teens are characterised by healing of her own definition. she goes to those indie but stylish gigs and pretends she finds fun in them, when really the enjoyment comes from dressing up alone in her room before she meets up with her friends (well, she’s not sure anyone will ever be her friend, and not from a lack of trying on their part. they’re just people to hang out with, whose company she enjoys more than anyone else’s, but ultimately she still feels out of place, like it’s only a matter of time before they all move on with their lives) and dancing in the dark, where for a moment it’s like she’s purposefully entered her own instrumentality. she takes a cigarette when offered and coughs it back up, and she vows to never do it again, lest she dies from embarrassment.</p><p>it’s a sedate form of life, but at least this way she can keep her footing, or know when she’s about to fall.</p><p>when she sees hikari again, it’s back in japan – nerv want her to consult sometimes, not only because of her experience but because of her brain – and her first instinct is to look away. stupid her, though, for forgetting hikari would ever let her pull that shit with her. (forgetting asuka langley is a punishable offence, after all!)</p><p>hikari’s hair is shorter, sitting pretty beneath her chin. her face looks more open than it did before, though asuka can still see it if she looks: that little piece of her that didn’t want to come back.</p><p>hikari pulls her into a hug before she can even think twice about it, all elbows. asuka tries to wiggle out as politely as she can.</p><p>“oh no you don’t,” hikari says, holding her closer. her chin fits perfectly on the crook of asuka’s shoulder. asuka tries very hard not to think about it.</p><p>when hikari pulls back, her smile’s a bit muddled between her mouth and her eyes. “i guess ‘how are you’ isn’t going to cut it, huh?”</p><p>the thought lashes at her quickly, but the scar still stays: it’s easy to spend so much time thinking about what died at the expense of thinking about what didn’t. she’ll take this thought and try to mold it into something more – not a weapon this time, but a shield. for now, asuka tries to smile back. perhaps it’s time to move on.</p>
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